Originally, a Martian day was about 37 minutes longer than an Earth day, but the two planets appear to be closing the time gap. Days are getting shorter on Mars, and scientists aren’t sure why, according to a new analysis of data from NASA’s InSight lander.
InSight has landed on Mars since 2018 to conduct scientific experiments. In 2022, the solar panels were full of dust and could not provide power to the lander. Eventually, it ran out of power and stopped responding to calls from the Earth control center.
Although NASA announced the end of its mission on December 21, InSight continues to help scientists uncover many aspects of Mars. For example, InSight carries a pair of radio antennas that can help measure the rotation of Mars. After excluding other factors such as the solar wind and the moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere, scientists found that the rotation speed of Mars is accelerating—although the magnitude is very small, about 4 milliarcseconds per year, which is equivalent to shortening the time of a day by a few tenths of a millisecond.
The earth’s rotation speed seems to be accelerating in recent years, and the moon may play an important role in it. Some scientists even suggested reducing the universal time by 1 second. However, the two satellites of Mars are very small, so it should not be the main cause of the change in the duration of Mars. Scientists believe that it may be the change in the mass of the polar ice cap, or the land is covered by new glaciers that cause the change in rotation speed.
new paperPublished in the journal Nature.
(Source of the first picture:NASA）
